1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an acoustic effect assignment controlling apparatus for controlling assignment of acoustic effects to be added to a musical tone signal generated in a musical tone generating apparatus and to a computer readable medium having recorded thereon a computer program for controlling assignment of acoustic effects to a musical tone signal.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, electronic musical instruments are provided with effect functions for adding various acoustic effects onto a musical tone signal generated therein. The effect function serves to give realistic sensation onto the musical tone signal generated therein, thereby realizing fresh representation. Among the effect functions, an insertion effect function adds an acoustic effect to each tone color part (performance part) of a musical tone signal, and allows a user to make more real and delicate sounds. Meanwhile, a conventional effect function executes a mixing process on the entire musical tone signal and adds acoustic effects to the musical tone signal thus subjected to the mixing process. Therefore, it is hard for the conventional effect function to add separate acoustic effects to tone color parts of the musical tone signal, respectively.
The insertion effect function described above can be used to select arbitrary effect algorithms from among a plurality of effect algorithms and to set the selected effect algorithms to insertion effects, thereby assigning the insertion effects to tone color parts which a user wants to add acoustic effects, wherein the number of insertion effects to be assigned is limited.
As described above, the insertion effect function is limited in the number of insertion effects (effect resource) which can be assigned to tone color parts at the same time. Therefore, if the user assigns the insertion effects to the tone color parts of a musical tone signal without paying attention to the limited number of the insertion effects to be assigned, the number of the insertion effects to be assigned is simply squandered, and the assigned insertion effects contribute nothing in making user's imaged or desired sounds.
Meanwhile, there have been proposed various methods of assigning insertion effects. The methods of assigning insertion effects are classified broadly into two categories, one includes methods in which the user manually assigns insert effects separately to performance parts (for example, refer to JP 2003-15643 A), and the other one includes methods that automatically search for an insertion effect not in use and assigns the found insertion effect to the performance part (for example, refer to JP 2002-258844 A).
But, the method disclosed in to JP 2003-15643 A has a troublesome disadvantage that require the user to understand setting information about which effect algorithm has been set or whether no effect algorithm has been set, for setting appropriate insertion effects to tone color parts.
Though the method disclosed in JP-2002-258844 A has no troublesome disadvantage that requires the user to manage setting information as required in the method of JP 2003-15643 A, the method of JP 2002-258844 A automatically searches for an used insertion effects and assigns the found insertion effects to the performance part of a musical tone signal. Therefore, even if the same acoustic effect is used for different tone color parts, a problem can arise that the same effect algorithm has been set to different insertion effects, uselessly consuming the limited number of insertion effects to be assigned. At worst, the method of JP 2002-258844 A does not help the user in making his or her desired sounds but can disturb the user in making good sounds.
The present invention has been made in consideration of the above disadvantages of the conventional techniques, and has an object to provide a technique that automatically adds acoustic effects separately to musical tone signals generated based on tone color information set to plural tone color parts, without disturbing the user in making his or her desired sounds.